A blue wave coming? Extreme gerrymandering could make it a ripple.

These are the folks — the nine Supreme Court justices — who will decide if excessive partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, with a ruling expected this summer.

These are the folks — the nine Supreme Court justices — who will decide if excessive partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, with a ruling expected this summer.

Photo: J. Scott Applewhite /Associated Press

Photo: J. Scott Applewhite /Associated Press

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These are the folks — the nine Supreme Court justices — who will decide if excessive partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, with a ruling expected this summer.

These are the folks — the nine Supreme Court justices — who will decide if excessive partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, with a ruling expected this summer.

Photo: J. Scott Applewhite /Associated Press

A blue wave coming? Extreme gerrymandering could make it a ripple.

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There is sweeping the nation exuberant talk of a blue wave that will flip the U.S. House this year for Democrats — a hope more mutely uttered about the Senate.

This hope springs from the purely democratic — small “d” — notion that if a majority of a state’s residents vote a particular way, that side wins. Also, that House district lines should be drawn to reflect, as much as possible, how people popularly vote, while compactly including communities of interest in these districts.

In too many states, that’s not happening. U.S. House elections are to democratic voting what the Black Sox scandal of 1919 was to World Series sportsmanship.

The same sort of game rigging is at play in politics today — in Texas included.

A recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice posits a harsh reality. It essentially says that, absent a wave of tsunami proportions, rigged systems of partisan and racial gerrymandering in the states could act as highly effective sea walls, with only minimal spillage lapping over the top.

In other words, even if the popular votes for the parties in these states surpass modern highs, there could be little difference in which party wins the majority of these states’ congressional delegations in the November election.

And Texas, of course, figures prominently, its redistricting discriminatory — a feature noticed, by the way, by the courts but vehemently denied by those who control how the lines are drawn (even as they acknowledge they are drawn that way to keep their party in power).

Both parties play — looking at you, Maryland Democrats — but it has become clear that this is more a Republican pursuit owing to how many state legislatures the party now controls.

Except for the relatively few states that have independent redistricting commissions, state legislatures are tasked with redistricting every 10 years — to reflect population changes revealed by the U.S. census. The gerrymandering has worsened in the past decade only because more sophisticated technology exists to make cheating easier.

The report says that for Democrats to obtain a bare majority in the U.S. House, they will have to win the national popular vote by 11 points nationally.

“Neither Democrats nor Republicans have won by such an overwhelming margin in decades,” the report says. “Even a strong blue wave would crash against a wall of gerrymandered maps.”

Implicit in this calculation: Congressional district lines should be drawn at least making an effort to comport to how people popularly vote — not always possible with all districts owing to clustered residential patterns, but a valid rule of thumb. When these maps are drawn this way — which is to say, fairly — they are called “responsive,” when not, “unresponsive.”

And this is another way of saying that voters shouldn’t be purposely “fractured,” certain of their numbers diminished in some districts or packed in others, rigged purely so one party maintains its legislative majority.

But that’s precisely how it works in Texas and other states the Brennan Center for Justice studied for this report, “Extreme Gerrymandering & the 2018 Midterm.”

For instance, Democrats have 11 (or 30.5 percent) of Texas’ 36 congressional seats, though in 2016 they won 42.29 percent of the popular vote.

This year, because of gerrymandering, they will have to win 41.07 percent of the vote to compete for an additional seat and won’t have a chance at a 13th seat unless they get 51.15 percent of the vote. Democrats have to win 53.62 percent of the vote for a chance to compete for a majority of the state’s congressional seats.

So, according to the report, “Putting even a few seats in play would require Democrats to win a larger share of the vote than they have all decade.” The same applies to North Carolina.

The report looks at the history of Texas’ most recent redistricting.

“Between 2000 and 2010, Texas grew faster than any state in the country, adding nearly 4.3 million people and gaining four congressional seats as a result. … Latinos and African Americans collectively (made) up 89 percent of the growth and Latinos themselves (accounted) for nearly two-thirds.”

Redistricting ensued, then groups representing minority groups sued because the Legislature failed to create even one additional district where minorities could elect a candidate of their choosing. That legal challenge continues (the U.S. Supreme Court hearing arguments on Tuesday), though there already was one redrawing by a federal court that improved matters slightly.

Under that original plan, however, “For Democrats to win more than one-third of seats … they would need to win close to half the vote.”

That, and even the slightly improved map, fit the textbook definition of rigged. And in Texas, also the textbook definition of institutional racism.

In Texas (and North Carolina), the gerrymandering is obviously done to suppress minority representation — though GOP leaders say it is being done purely to disadvantage Democrats, as if this also weren’t blatantly unfair. But the former represents racial gerrymandering (always illegal when proven), the latter partisan gerrymandering, keeping one party or the other in power, which the courts so far have failed to rule is clearly illegal.

That could change.

The Supreme Court is considering cases, from Wisconsin and Maryland, that ask whether excessive partisan gerrymandering is also unconstitutional. But any such ruling, the experts say, will not likely change the 2018 maps.

Unless equal treatment under the law has ceased to have any meaning, the Supreme Court should, of course, find partisan gerrymandering to be illegal. I am not, however, taking any bets on this outcome.

In any case, the claim by Texas GOP leaders that they are targeting Democrats, not minorities, doesn’t pass the smell test. In Texas, where voting is racially and ethnically polarized, it is a distinction without a difference. The fastest growing portion of the population — Latinos — tends to vote overwhelmingly Democratic, as do African-Americans.

And Republicans have simply come to the conclusion that instead of aggressively wooing and competing for these votes, they will suppress them. Redistricting is one way — voter ID laws and strict third-party voter registration rules are others.

Alas, erecting such obstacles has a long, sorry history in Texas, the methods just becoming a bit more sophisticated, though no less blunt.

In the meantime, if a blue wave in the popular vote happens this year and there is little to no change in Democratic representation, this will be a testament to how this process can, thanks to technological enhancements, be rendered democracy-proof.

There are too many scandals to count these days, but gerrymandering of any type is among the gravest of our age. That it isn’t widely considered so is also scandalous. This acceptance is predicated on “your group’s ox is gored, but (because of that goring) my group — um, ox — thrives.”

As the report also details, there is simply no need for this state of affairs.

California in 2008 adopted an independent commission to draw the state’s districts, staring with the 2010 election cycle. The result: “When Democrats win half of the statewide vote, they are projected to win about half of the seats.”

Perhaps, this is what our top elected leaders mean when they warn of the moral rot that comes if the dreaded Californization of Texas ever takes root.